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PIPER WOKE UP the next morning as she did every morning—her head throbbing for a cup of coffee. She started drinking coffee when she was fourteen. She had just started her freshman year of high school and had to wake up significantly earlier for the 7:30 AM start time, but it was feeling compelled to fix up her hungover father before school that brought her to guzzling caffeine on an addictive, cyclic repeat. She supposed her drug of choice could've been worse, though.
The next year when JJ started high school, Piper did significantly less fixing-up of her father. JJ never understood why Piper felt responsible for their dad—Luke was an abusive nuisance. That was true, Piper understood where JJ was coming from, but that didn't stop Piper from feeling like she should be taking care of their father. But, because JJ was waking up at the same time as Piper again and was aware that she was the one making their hungover father look and seem as sober as possible, he made it blatantly clear that he thought Piper should stop. So, she did. She didn't stop drinking coffee, though. In fact, without having to do something in the morning before school, she needed something to wake her up more than she had before.
So, coffee was just something that became part of Piper's morning routine: wake up; push JJ off of her if necessary; make coffee; do a miscellaneous chore that wouldn't get done if she didn't do it; drink aforementioned coffee. It was just a known fact that while JJ drank stale beer in the morning against his better judgement, Piper would be nursing, possibly, the shittiest cup of coffee known to man. So, it wasn't an unbelievable lie when Piper told John B and JJ the next morning, "You have fun with that. I'm gonna drop off a practice test for Willa and squat a pot of coffee off my rich, generator-having bosses."
John B and JJ were sitting on mix-matched furniture on the front porch, and Piper was sitting on the railing, her back against one of the supporting four-by-fours. Her knees were bent, and she was using them as a table for her to highlight words in that morning's word search in the News & Observer with a more-or-less dried-out orange highlighter. John B was turning his father's compass in his hand. He hadn't let anybody else touch it since he pulled it out of the canister the night before, but he was constantly fidgeting with it like it would magically reveal answers to him. JJ wasn't drinking beer, instead he was devising a plan to snatch the compass away from John B. Piper understood it was, like, some paternal sign or whatever for John B, but the more he played with it, the more it made Piper nervous, so she supported JJ's plans of thievery.
"But—" John B said, snapping his head up from watching the compass around in his hand.
Piper cut him off, though, "Talking to Ms. Lana about that—" she gestured vaguely toward the compass— "might be one of the worse ideas you've had, John B. Her husband just drowned, and we were shot at over the very thing her husband drowned with, and you wanna wave it in her face?"
